"Usual labour" Maharashtra, India. Photograph by Flickr user nvbr11 and used under a Creative Commons
license.

In an
innovative bid to fight gender discrimination, Satara district in India’s
western state of Maharashtra recently witnessed a minor revolution. Over 285 Indian
girls named Nakhushi, ‘unwanted’ in Hindi, by their disenchanted parents were
rechristened in a state-organized ceremony.

Trussed up in their Sunday best, the girls were all smiles amidst
the pop of camera bulbs. "My friends will be calling me with my new name
now. And that makes me very happy. My earlier name made me feel
worthless," 15-year-old Nakhushi, now renamed Muskaan or ‘a smile’, says into the TV
camera.

But will changing girls names combat their internalized sense of
worthlessness and improve the status of women and girls in India?

India has never been a happy place for women. The World Economic
Forum’s latest Gender Inequality Index (GII) places the country at 129 out of
146 countries, better only than Afghanistan in South Asia.

Gender bias in Indian society is blatant. Apart from the extreme
practices of feticide, infanticide and honor killings, discrimination against
Indian girls persists through parental prejudices, lack of educational
opportunities, and unfair resource allocation.

The discrimination against the girl child manifests itself
everywhere - even in educated, well-off households. A few years back I was
shocked when one of my colleagues, a well-qualified woman in her thirties with
two daughters, confided in me that she “got her baby dropped” when she found
out it was a girl. “I’ll keep getting pregnant until I have a boy. The baby
will be born only once it’s confirmed that it’s a male,” she told me with
finality.

Was she being coerced into this situation I asked her, concerned
about the ease with which she narrated the episode to me. “Yes,” she replied.
“My husband hinted that my mom-in-law is keen her son remarry if we can’t have
a male heir.”

In the mid-1960s, sex-determination technology was introduced in India as a population control measure. Nobel laureate Amartya Sen
famously wrote in 1990 of the 100 million missing women, especially in Asia,
and of how these numbers “tell us, quietly, a terrible story of inequality and
neglect leading to excess mortality of women.”

The Prenatal Diagnostics Techniques (regulation and prevention of
misuse) Act was enacted in 1994 and brought into operation in 1996. After over
two decades, it seems little has changed. India’s latest Census figures reveal that the country’s male-female
ratio is the worst since 1961 -- just 914 girls for every 1,000 boys. According
to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), 102 to 106 boys should be born
for every 100 girl children.

In Satara this equation is a grim 881 to 1,000 boys. For the northern
state of Haryana, notorious for crimes against women, including honor killings,
the picture is especially bleak - in Duleypur village, the sex ratio at birth
is 400 females per 1,000 males.

The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) estimates that every
day 7,000 fewer girls are born in India than should be. So where does the problem lie? According
to a UNFPA population report released in October, an overwhelming majority of
the 117 million ‘missing’ girls in Asia are from India
and China. They are vanishing primarily due to the increased use of
ultrasonography or ultrasound machines.

The moment the UN report came out radiologists in Mumbai were up
in arms. “Ultrasound has been around for decades. If it’s such a widely used
tool for sex determination then girls should have disappeared in larger numbers
by now,” Indian Radiological & Imaging Association president Dr Jignesh
Thakker told one Indian daily. The city’s radiologists are already fighting a
bitter battle against the Maharashtra
government’s recent directive that forbids the use of portable ultrasound
machines for sex determination purposes.

Not that the national capital city of New Delhi fares any better. Mara Hvistendahl, the author of Unnatural Selection
writes how it is a standard practice for doctors at All India Institute of
Medical Sciences – a premier state-run hospital – to disclose the sex of the
fetus to the moms-to-be and even help them abort it if they so desire.

“We need to amplify our voices about sonography's misuse so that
public opinion can be built up and stringent action is taken against the wrong
doers," says Pramila Kirk, an NGO worker. Kirk advises that if the state
government makes software to keep track of all scans mandatory for ultrasound
machines, it will dramatically augment the child-sex ratio.

Some doctors believe, however, that instead of spending about
USD800 per machine on installing silent observer software, the sum should be invested
in pro girl child policies. Experts add that the argument that prenatal
diagnostic tests give women a ‘choice’ to select a child of the desired sex is
specious. Women’s choices, especially in India’s patriarchal society, are determined by societal pressure
to produce male heirs.

This means that four decades after the passage of the landmark
Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act that legalized abortion in India, the legislation is being exploited to kill unborn
daughters. The Lancet
estimates that between three and six million girls have been aborted over the
past decade. Sex selective abortion happens because sex determination tests
have become a breeze. Woman simply walk into a shop and get the needed test
done.

India’s Planning Commission, the country’s premier body that
formulates policy, recently relaxed the ban on sex-selection tests in rural
areas. At the same time, it is also in the midst of proposing a program to
‘adopt’ female fetuses and give incentives to families and health workers to
deliver female babies.

People suspect there are other interests behind the Commission's
new proposal. According to human rights activist and lawyer Pramod Kamayani,
"female feticide is organized murder. Parents do it because they want to
get rid of daughters; the doctors do it for a quick buck and the government
looks upon it as an effective and free population control method. With such a
well-entrenched nexus in place, how can the situation be improved?”

Perhaps things can be improved by implementing imaginative public
policies to set right the gender skew. Already, some state government schemes
are providing incentives for parents to embrace girl children and make for more
balanced birth rates. Measures like providing bicycles for school-going girls
have proved to be efficacious in empowering the girl child.

While giving hundreds of nakhushis
a new name is laudable, real transformation will come about only if, along with
the name change, mindsets are changed too. Maharashtra is planning to reward couples whose third child is a girl
by sponsoring her education and bestowing other financial rewards upon her.
Hopefully this will truly lead to a new beginning.